LimeSurvey is an open source survey software written in PHP. LimeSurvey source code is hosted on GitHub. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the LimeSurvey Community Edition (CE) installation process on a fresh CentOS 7 system.

Requirements

In order to install LimeSurvey (CE) on your CentOS 7 system, make sure your system meets the following requirements:

Minimum 250 MB disk space.

MySQL 5.5.3 or later or MariaDB 5.5 or later. This tutorial will use MariaDB.

PHP 5.5.9 or later (PHP 7.0.0+ is recommended) with the following extensions: Mbstring, PDO database driver for MySQL or PostgreSQL, GD-Library, IMAP, LDAP, ZIP.

Apache 2.4 or later or Nginx 1.1 or later. This tutorial will use Nginx.

Initial steps

Check your CentOS system version:

cat /etc/centos-release# CentOS Linux release 7.5.1804 (Core)

Set up the timezone:

timedatectl list-timezonessudo timedatectl set-timezone 'Region/City'

Update your operating system’s packages:

sudo yum update -y

Install vim, git, unzip, and socat packages:

sudo yum install -y vim git unzip socat

Step 1 - Install PHP

LimeSurvey requires PHP version 5.5.9 or greater, while PHP 7.0.0+ is the recommended version. Default CentOS repositories contain older version of PHP, and thus we will need to set up a third-party repository to install a newer PHP version. We will use Webtatic repository.